Quotes from Steve Backshall

Baffin Island was extraordinary; one of the most terrifying things I've done.

Fences split up the territory that a hedgehog has to forage in so having a little hole in your fence could well enable it to move in and out of your garden.

I've been doing expeditions for a living for more than 20 years and know all about what you have to go through psychologically to separate yourself from the modern world.

I am very driven by things that scare and frighten me, and things that might be tough for me.

And there are very few wild animals that can't run down a human being; the big predators would run down Usain Bolt without even thinking about it. So your only chance is to stand your ground!

Britain has some of the finest climbing on the planet, with a sense of wilderness that rivals anywhere else on earth. You can be on a rock face watching crashing waves and feeling a million miles away but because we're a small isle, you're never really that remote; there's always a village nearby.

If you ask most wildlife film-makers or biologists what the greatest wildlife spectacle on Earth is, they'll say wildebeest migration or the Great Barrier Reef - but to me it's in Alaska is the summer.

I appreciate that I'm in the privileged situation of getting to spend my entire life outdoors with wildlife, and I know first hand how good it makes you feel, and it's a message that I have to try to get across to kids because as an adult, I can see the dangers that normal modern life exacts upon children.

Living my life in conservation, I see far greater tragedies and crimes against wildlife than the loss of a few thousand badgers. The real reason so many people are so unsettled by the cull is its sinister reflection on the democratic process, on our government's attitude to conservation and to science.

All my books draw heavily on my own experiences, and these are not just places I have gone to on holiday, they're locations I know them intimately from lengthy expeditions, most of which have been spent on the hunt for wildlife.

Certainly jellyfish are seasonal, and owing to a complex range of environmental features there are years when they will appear in far greater numbers.

I think if you go out with too hard a conservation message, then you convince people that it's all doom and gloom and nothing can be done.

I had a good deal of power work - lots of plyometrics, callisthenics, tossing big tyres. It's all geared towards having that explosiveness available when you need it.

Hedgehogs need somewhere to hibernate through the winter, but also a place that they can lie out at during the day. So have a few places around your garden that are a bit wild, maybe a log pile, potentially even a hedgehog home, all of which are going to be prime real estate for one of these little guys.

I guess I'm a dog person, so the canids have a special power for me. And yet wolves are everything our own pet pooches are not; untameable, primal, doing all they can to avoid people and wandering the wildest corners of our globe.

If I could be any animal I'd probably be a wandering albatross, the bird with the largest wing span. Being able to cover huge distances of sea every single day would be wonderful!

After more than 40 years of living in the British countryside, any day I see a badger is precious. I knew the location of every sett in the woods around my childhood home, but rarely saw them with my own eyes.

I know plenty of people who live in the country who have never seen a badger. They are definitely there, but these nocturnal delights remain elusive, and thus are still a thrill.

Being charged by a furious matriarch elephant certainly had hearts in mouths, as did the snarling spitting Bengal tiger that gave us a fright in India.

My job has changed so much over recent years because of social media. You can now watch a programme and see how the audience respond to certain moments and it was overwhelming to see how people responded to 'Big Blue Live'.

My dad will sit out in the last tiny corner of the garden that has sunshine until the millisecond the final vestige has gone! As kids we were encouraged to head out of the front door at daybreak, and not come back till we were tired and hungry.

Fiction was a massive, massive part of my formative years, far more so than television ever was, and I always hoped that my future would lie with writing.

I love what I do for a living and even if I wasn't getting paid for it I would still pursue an active, outdoors lifestyle, researching animals and looking after them.

My wife Helen is Cornish and both sides of her family are Cornish going back at least a dozen generations. And I envy that and desperately want it for my children.